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My 4 year old son loves the show Artzooka! on kids CBC, so we often try to do the crafts featured on the show. Some of them require specialized materials or are geared for older kids, but we have had a lot of fun with many of the Arzooka! crafts. One that we saw a few weeks ago was particularly suited to my son, as he had always raved about similar activities that he did at preschool. I don’t find the Arzooka! website easy to navigate, so I haven’t linked to their instruction page for this. I did a quick look and couldn’t find it, so it may not even be there. Here’s how we did our splatter paintings:

Equipment:

small bottles of paint (we used of acrylic paint that we had left over from a previous project)

paper (we used 8-1/2 X 14 printer paper)

markers

If you’re doing this with small children I would recommend folding your paper first. That way the crease is already down the centre and your kids can “fold it” on their own after they’ve done their splattering. I hadn’t pre-folded the first one, so once Danny had finished adding the paint he folded it on his own, but it wasn’t anywhere near the middle, so his painting didn’t really turn out.

2. Let your kid go wild with the paint bottles. Simply squeeze paint out in crazy designs all over the paper. It’s definitely more fun if you have more colours. I was really surprised how many paintings we were able to do with just a few small bottles of paint.

3. Fold your paper in half and press down to smoosh the paint into a neat design.

4. Unfold and admire your beautiful artwork! Have fun deciding what each one looks like.

5. Let your artwork dry. (We left them overnight)

6. Get our your markers and add details like facial features or additional scenery to turn your abstract splatterings into actual pictures. Here’s one that Danny turned into a bunny. It’s really fun to see their imaginations go wild 🙂

I’ve only shown a few pieces here, but we’ve done this activity 4 times now and have produced over 20 pictures, all with 5 leftover bottles of acrylic paint. One caution: acrylic paint is NOT washable, so make sure that you have your painting bibs on!